Future Reborn Box Set

by Daniel Pierce

  I knew what the fuel was for, and the distillery made sense as the pieces clicked home in my battered mind. Blood loss and ‘bots warred with each other as I made my unsteady way toward the sound of civilization, the engine revving twice in a metallic symphony that made me smile through the pain. A car. Here. Some things hadn’t been lost after all.

  I lifted my gun, both barrels pointed at the windshield as the engine revved again. Instead of a warning, I fired.

  The buckshot sparkled away without so much as a mark on the glass. “Fucking bulletproof. Of course.”

  Taksa laughed from inside the blue car, harsh with triumph. He eased down the ramps, which flexed dangerously low to the sand, tipping the car forward before springing back. When all four wheels were down, his smile was a pale crescent in a face twisted with victory. I stood ten feet away, weapon useless at my side as he cut the wheel and began to pull away at a leisurely pace, his knuckles white despite his attempt to appear unconcerned.

  “You never lived in a city, did you, asshole?” I asked, moving alongside the vehicle with growing speed. He had to squeeze between the wagons, so acceleration was impossible, which revealed the fatal flaw of a petty tyrant.

  I tore the door open with my free hand, dropping my gun and hurling him ten meters through the air with a wailing scream. “Shoulda locked the fucking door.” I pushed the kill button, threw the shifter, and stood next to the most beautiful sight of the day. A car. My car and all I had to do was kill the man who had brought more pain to the world than a plague of demons.

  I lunged for Taksa, my lips curving in savage glee. All of the anger, hate, and regret for seeing the people hanging in the Black Room came boiling out in a roar of primal rage. Taksa raised a pistol, firing once to strike me even as I sailed through the air to land on him like a hammer of pure revenge. Blood spattered from my side as we rolled down an incline, my weight punishing him with each turn, even as I felt myself growing weaker from the wound. He batted at my hands, now firmly around his neck and compressing until his eyes rolled back and he went limp as a ragdoll.

  “Jack, we’re here,” Silk said, rolling me over as Mira put her gun in Taksa’s mouth. His eyes fluttered open, going wide in terror as he realized what pressed against his tongue.

  “Give me a fucking reason,” Mira growled. “Any reason.”

  Silk pressed a cloth to my side, but I pulled hard on her hands to struggle upward. I was going to pass out and had a single question for Taksa that had to be answered. I stood, but just barely.

  “Let him talk,” I groaned, earning a hard stare from Mira. She obliged, pulling the barrel free of his mouth but keeping it close enough that he could smell the metal. Blood pooled at my side as pain lanced through me, but I bit down hard and formed the question. “How many bases?”

  “What?” Taksa asked.

  “Take his foot,” I told Mira. She fired without hesitation, splattering his right foot in a shower of gore, the gunshot leaving me deaf for a second. “One more foot. Two hands. We start there.” I gasped for breath, begging my ‘bots to give me one more minute. We needed to know. The free people of the Empty needed to know. “How many?”

  “S-s-six,” Taksa sobbed, his face no longer human, but a mask of agony.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “The wall,” he gasped, eyes rolling wild like a mortally wounded animal. I felt no joy in his pain, only disgust.

  “Down below? The glass writing?” Silk asked.

  “Yesss...we can’t read it, but we know the number six. We don’t—we don’t know where. Six, damn you, six!” Taksa howled, then spat a gobbet of blood at me as he contorted in pain yet again.

  “That’s enough,” I said, swaying in the heat. I’ve never felt so weak, cold, or tired. Every nerve in my body cried out for sleep, and every part of my mind demanded justice. I looked down at Taksa, who felt the storm coming with animal instinct.

  He started to beg like I knew he would. “No—I know things. I have caches, secrets. I have people in Kassos and beyond. The world! You can command, you can—”

  My knife parted his throat with a sigh, his hands slapping up in a desperate attempt to stop the flow of blood. I leaned down and pushed the blade through his stomach, earning a high shriek that caromed off the wagons before fading the light the light in his eyes.

  “I will command without you or your sister,” I said, but he was gone. “Are the ogres nearby?” I asked, slumping to the ground.

  “Yes,” Silk answered. I think she knew what I wanted.

  “Call them,” I told her. She did, and several of them came over with reluctance, their noses twitching in fear at the fresh blood. “Dead,” I said, pointing to Taksa and then the Black Room. “Yours.”

  The ogres hung back, fear slowly turning to rage. A big male stepped forward, reaching out with a huge hand to poke at Taksa’s corpse.

  “Dead,” I repeated. “Yours.” I nodded that he could take the body. He lifted Taksa’s blood dripping body and threw the corpse into the middle of a dozen ogres. With an unseen command, they fell on Taksa with their fists, howling with pent-up rage as they broke his body apart in an orgy of violence that made me turn away. “Better to let them work out their own pain. They’re free, and they need to know he can’t hurt them.”

  In seconds, the horde descended on the Black Room, tearing it to kindling before stopping when they found the bodies. With odd reverence, the ogres snapped the bonds with ease, setting the victims in a line under the rising sun. As one, they lifted their heads in silent accord, honoring the dead in their own way.

  “Still human after all this,” I said in disgust.

  “They always were,” Silk said, her eyes shining with tears.

  “To the garden?” Mira asked, her eyes focused on my wounds. The bleeding was slowing, but pain slowed my speech and made the air thick around me. We were at the very edge of the saplings, the wagons having made progress after our first attack. The car would keep for now, the ogres were free. I would survive, though just then, I didn’t want to. The pain was intense, and I silently hoped I didn’t black out.

  “To the Free Oasis,” I said.

  “I like it,” Mira agreed, lending her arm to me as I swayed across the sand. “I wonder if anyone will come?”

  “I hope so,” I said through my teeth. I put one foot in front of the other until I heard running water, and then I collapsed, the shade covering my face in cool relief.

  We’d won. Now the real work would finally begin.

  Epilogue

  “Who is it?” Silk asked, her hand shading the sun. Wagons approached from Alatus, flying pennants of white cloth. Whoever they were, they weren’t hiding.

  I climbed to my feet, slow but steady. In the days since killing Taksa, my ‘bots had gone into overdrive, but the scar tissue was still livid. It would be some time before I was fully healed, and in the meantime, we explored the Free Oasis at a casual pace, making notes of everything useful for our future plans. “Can’t see just yet. Maybe drive out to meet them?” I asked, earning a withering stare from everyone at once. “What? It’s a Mustang. Why not?” Finding the car had been nothing short of a miracle, but finding a 2031 Mustang made my heart sing. I fought the urge to sit in it like a lovesick teenager, finally agreeing to cover it up for protection. Mira and Silk lived with each other, but they wouldn’t live with metallic competition. They already referred to the car as “the other woman,” even if they smiled while saying it.

  Mira came up behind me, hands behind her back. “Maybe you should greet them from here?”

  “What’s that?” I asked her.

  Natif shouted from the outer ring of saplings. “It’s ready, Mira.” He stood next to a pole that wasn’t there the night before. A flagpole.

  “For the Free Oasis. Made it from what we found in the Harlings’ stashed wagons,” Mira said, unrolling a flag of deep blue cloth. There were five white stars in the middle, all in a row. “We’re the first five. There will be more.”
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  “Starting with the Harlings,” Silk said, pointing to the approaching wagons. “We’re going to need more stars.”

  “Among other things,” I agreed. Lasser began waving, striding across the sands to greet the first new residents of the Free Oasis.

  “Can we survive?” Silk asked. It was the question we all lived with, every second of the day.

  “We have to. Otherwise, why did I ever bother waking up?” I said, taking their hands as we walked out into the sands. Above, a hawk cried, then swooped to land in the trees. Life went on. The Free Oasis was real. We could live without fear.

  Now, for the rest of the world.

  Future Rebuilt

  Book 2 in the Future Reborn Series

  1

  “If we’re killing something, then I’m going to need a better ponytail,” Mira said, binding her honey-colored hair with a length of thick twine. The desert wind was snappy, and Mira’s green eyes narrowed in the face of it as she smiled at me, full lips pulled to one side.

  “We’ll need more than just a ponytail,” I said, pushing my fingers into the animal tracks before me. Something huge had come close to the oasis, leaving a grisly calling card behind just over the last ridge. Two—possibly three, the scene was a mess—wolves had been cornered, killed, and partially eaten. These were the lanky desert wolves, not small animals, and they had been apex predators in my time.

  Emphasis on had been. The Empty was a bad place to be meat, and the wolves learned it the hard way. In the 2000 years I was sleeping away the apocalypse, the world had gone from bad to worse. Predators of all kinds roamed the sands, rivers, and skies, but they all tended to have something in common that I found irresistible.

  They were delicious over a fire.

  “Two toed, looks like a hog. Bigger than anything I’ve ever seen,” I said. My hands are big, but even I couldn’t span the length of a hoof print, ground into the gritty soil and spotted with the blood of an unfortunate wolf. “They get gigantic, I guess?”

  My hunting partner Mira just nodded. She was more than capable of killing anything in the desert, but for safety purposes, we always went in pairs. Me with my nanobot enhancements, her with two decades of experience. It was a simple rule as we built the Free Oasis into an island of civilization on a broken world. Don’t do anything stupid was the first rule we adhered to. The second rule was even simpler: the stupidest thing of all is getting killed.

  “Gun or knife?” she asked, thumbing the safety on her rifle. There was a series of rippling canyons just ahead, sheltered from the wind and deep enough to act as cover for something that was, no doubt, busy tearing apart the remains of a hundred-pound wolf. The blood trail led us here. Our weapons would end the journey in the same place, with the purpose of our little jaunt being nothing more complex than dinner. I didn’t see boar tracks. I saw an invitation to free barbecue, and I fucking love barbecue. With more people to feed each day, it made sense to hunt when we could.

  Like now.

  “Jack?” Mira asked, breaking me out of my reverie.

  “Sorry. Got thinking about barbecue. And beer. Maybe air conditioning, too,” I said, running a hand over my black hair. I had green goggles resting on my head, the thick lenses perfect for cutting the ruthless Empty sunshine. I pulled them down, smiling at Mira. “Kiss for luck,” I told her.

  We’d done more than kiss the night before, but it was a good ritual, no matter what the occasion. I made it a point to assure Mira and Silk—who was sensibly back at the Oasis, directing the watering team—that we were connected, real, and we mattered to each other. It was the only way to reclaim our humanity in a sea of disaster.

  The fact that both women were gorgeous was immaterial. I was saving the world, one perfect ten at a time.

  “Kiss for luck,” she agreed, and we did, and it was brief but good, and she laughed, her teeth flashing in the brilliant light. “Now let’s go slaughter this hog and get the kids dragging it back. I’m hungry.”

  “Thought you’d never ask,” I said. “Knives. I respect the pig, but I don’t want to blow a ham apart just because I’m scared of getting my hands dirty.”

  She hesitated, then gave me a terse nod. “Mind the tusks. The only one I’ve seen up close could gut an ogre with one tooth.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll watch the tusks. They’re heavy, thick?” I asked her, unsheathing one of my short swords.

  “Thick as your wrist.” She held her hands apart, and I whistled. I smelled blood on the wind and knew the beast was eating, though it was down in the gulley, out of our sight.

  “I go in from up top. You put a round in its head if I miss, but only the head. Even in my time, wild hogs had thick gristle on their chest cavities. Tough bastards,” I said, ceasing to the edge of the depression. I could see the top of an animal, but the scale was—

  “There she is,” Mira breathed.

  “She? Holy shit. That’s a female?” I asked as the top of her head came into view. It wasn’t a pig. It was a truck with fangs, and it was busily chewing the leg of a wolf like a chicken wing. Thick black bristles covered the creature, which stood five feet at the shoulder, it’s hide a mismatched pattern of red and black stripes. The eyes were small, the tusks gigantic, and the muscles bulging, right down to the ridiculous tail that swished back and forth in a contented rhythm as it ate the wolf. The ears twitched when I rose up, as if she could hear me.

  “Big ‘un, huh?” Mira asked, her smile tight. She knew I was more than human, but the pig was far less than anything normal. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

  “Big meal, you mean.” I smiled again, if only to put her at ease. We’d been together for two months of hard work and adventure, and our own future was still a work in progress. From the loss of her sister to the fight with Taksa, she’d been a steady presence at my side.

  I didn’t intend to let a giant slab of bacon change that.

  “They lash up with those tusks, right?” I asked, my eyes never leaving the hog.

  “Up and to the side,” Mira said.

  “Then I’ll go in through the back door,” I told her. “Showtime. Cover me, babe.”

  “Will do,” she said, lifting her rifle as I jumped up and over the lip of the gulley.

  My feet landed in the gravel with a crunch. I expected the hog to look up and identify me as a threat, but she skipped that step entirely and went batshit crazy at the first sound of my landing.

  With a squealing roar, she was charging me as I brought my sword up in a glittering arc, the blade whistling with a lethal song as I leapt up, twisting to the side with my arm out for balance. The sky spun around me, blue on blue, while underneath me the giant hog raked the air with her tusks, each length of ivory hissing as it cut the air like a scythe.

  I grunted, landing hard and coming to a battle-ready position as the hog’s tiny butt turned impossibly fast, tail wagging with joy at the idea of killing something. She lowered her enormous head and charged me again, all in the span of seconds. Spittle flew from her mouth, nostrils bubbling with putrid saliva as her mouth opened to expose a bone white palate filled with yellow teeth crowded at wild angles. The tusks were even bigger up close, the inner edges ridged for maximum shearing. All in all, the hog was a perfectly designed killing machine.

  So was I.

  I planted my feet and blurred into motion, streaking forward in a half-leap that carried me over the charging hog and to the right, a slashing backswing ripping into the tough chest wall as she squealed with indignant rage, but not before her tusk caught my wrist to spin me around with savage force.

  I landed elbow first in the grit, and she was on me again despite my augmented body. The Empty made tough animals tougher and fast animals faster. She was both.

  I’d gone high the first time, yielding a long cut down her side. The next attack would be more direct, because the beast wasn’t going to tire anytime soon. I shook out the stinging impact on my arm and switched my grip, my left hand closing over the sword handle as
I began to stab forward before the pig’s tiny eyes could register what was happening. She was fast and powerful, but that didn’t mean she had brakes.

  The point of my sword punched through her shoulder, sinking in far enough that her weight began to tear the blade from my hand, but I went with the cut, locking my shoulder and elbow in a line as I met her charge with everything I had.

  Her mouth opened and she roared.

  With a savage twist, I turned half my sword in her chest cavity, shredding lungs and heart with a series of jerks that turned the giant creature into the world’s largest breakfast sausage. In her dying gasp, she collapsed on me, driving her stinking snout into my eye with enough force to snap my head back against the ground. I’d have a shiner, but she was stone dead before I could begin sliding out from underneath the body, which stank like a charnel house.

  “Little help, babe,” I wheezed.

  “Gotcha,” Mira said from above, though there was a hidden laugh in her voice. “And here I thought I was more your type.”

  The hog splayed over me like the world’s worst date gone wrong, but with Mira’s help and a healthy dose of cussing, I was able to roll the slack corpse off onto the gravel.

  “You are. She isn’t. Not yet, anyway,” I gasped. The hog had scored me more than once in the fight, and the pain was flaring into existence now that the brawl had ended.

  “Are you saying you like bacon more than this?” Mira asked, waving a hand down the length of her athletic body.

  When I hesitated, she pretended to kick me, but I patted the air with my hands while catching my breath. “If I ever pick barbecue over you, go ahead and shoot me. You have my blessings.”

  “Good answer,” Mira said, smiling. Then she grew serious, looking the giant hog over as blood seeped from the mortal wound I delivered. “Is this going to fit in the ‘stang?”